


oceanographer's choice

by kosy



Series: conjugates [1]
Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Canonical Character Death, Complicated Relationships, F/F, Goes To The End Of Season 9, Morally Gray Jaylen Hotdogfingers, POV Second Person, The Inherent Horror Tragedy Of Blaseball, [sobbing] someone please let these numbers unionize, i mean she gets better., no wait come back—
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-26
Updated: 2020-10-26
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:40:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27203971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kosy/pseuds/kosy
Summary: You were holding Jaylen’s hand when she got incinerated.In the end, you remember that more than you do the spectacle itself. Others talk about the smoke or the bright flash that preceded it or the tongues of flame curling up into the hazy, sunless sky.You don't talk about any of it at all.(If you're going to strike out, make sure you strike out swinging.)
Relationships: Jaylen Hotdogfingers/Sutton Dreamy
Series: conjugates [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2111742
Comments: 27
Kudos: 44





	oceanographer's choice

**Author's Note:**

> hello everyone! content notes on this: most of the stuff that comes up with jaylen's death and resurrection in detail, swearing/sexual references that are Illegal in the official server, some good old fashioned self destruction. just know that stuff going in!
> 
> the title's from the mountain goats song of the same name. also, this only goes up to season nine because everything that happens after that was a Lot to unpack and i'm already pushing 20k words. also also thank you all so much for reading, please enjoy!

You were holding Jaylen’s hand when she got incinerated. 

In the end, you remember that more than you do the spectacle itself. Others talk about the smoke or the bright flash that preceded it or the tongues of flame curling up into the hazy, sunless sky. 

You don’t talk about any of it at all. 

You hold your tongue when the whole rest of the world tells stories about that night. You just remember the heat, the human warmth of Jaylen’s hand turning scalding until it crumbled to ash in the wind. You remember staggering backward as the rest of the crowd rushed in, and you remember staring at your blistered, blackened fingers, and you remember thinking _well, at least it’s not the left hand, right?_ and you remember the screaming. 

What you don’t remember is what her face looked like as she burned. You think you should probably be grateful for that small kindness. 

* * *

The months leading up to the first season and Great Return of blaseball are a feverish haze of training and promotional interviews and photoshoots and scrimmages and you’re exhausted but alight with the joy of it, of finally having a purpose, something to push at until either it breaks or you do. 

Even now, before the beginning, you cannot remember a time before blaseball.

It is gone from your mind. Could’ve been anything for you. If you concentrated you could maybe make out a life at a café, vacant smiles at the daily customers and the chocolate croissants you always snuck home to your roommate. But just as probable is the life where you’re a Philosophy major eking out an existence in Southern California, or the life where everything is the same but you play soccer instead, or the life where you illustrate children’s books, or the life where you’re a one-hit-wonder indiepop singer/songwriter whose career peaked in 2017. Or, hell, even the past some fans have created for you in their minds, the one with Combs Duende having drawn you into existence on a whim. Or you imagining yourself to life. It wouldn’t be that farfetched, considering everything, but thinking about at it makes your only-maybe-real heart beat too fast and then your breathing gets uneven and then you’re about to pass out in the middle of a 7-Eleven, so you try not to do that too much. 

Whatever you might have been before, it hardly matters by the time the first season hits in late March. 

The entire league is thrown headfirst into a punishing, endless scramble of games. There are no off days. There are no breaks. You start play at noon sharp and you go until you’re done and at the end of the three-set-matches you’re away once more. Maybe manage to hit up a bar or even, on some blessed nights, a _hotel,_ before you all cram yourselves into a shuttle at dawn and trundle on off to the airport again. 

The closest thing to respite anyone gets is the second night of one of those damn sets of three, when the jet lag’s worn off and sleeping in a little late doesn’t mean missing your goddamn five a.m. flight cross-country. But the Crabs are—well, the Crabs are a rowdy bunch. Have been since the start. So the first time you play in San Francisco, everyone stays up late through the second night, getting into friendly but extremely noisy arguments that always get you complaints from the other guests. 

And then, after cheerfully losing all three games to the Lovers, they stay up late the third night too. 

You give sleep your best shot—even had the foresight to buy Nyquil and some of those little foam earplugs from the drugstore down the road—but then it’s two in the morning and you all have to be awake again in an hour and the raucous laughter from Valentine, Kennedy, and Parker in the next room over shows no sign of stopping, _God, do they think really they’re gonna get any sleep on the flight?_ , so you haul yourself out of bed still wearing your sweatpants and a t-shirt, pull on your bomber jacket, and trudge out into the main suite. Your immediate sleep-deprived reaction is to snap at them to all please shut the hell up for once, but after hesitating in the doorway you slip past your teammates out into the main hallway and none of them try to stop you, just throw a wave in your direction as you stalk off, Parker giggling guiltily. 

Reluctantly, you wave back, then close the door behind you. It slides shut with a soft click, and you sigh, fingers still resting on the handle. It’s too late for you to really sleep anyway, so you might as well get fresh air and a rare moment of silence. 

There’s nothing more infinite or eerie, you think, than a hotel hallway in the middle of the night. Windowless and bathed in dull yellow light, the walls themselves seemingly aware that they are just a place for passing through, that they were created to be a sort of limbo, and they stretch on in endless loops coiling around and up and down. You doubt you could get lost even if you tried, but the effect is dreamlike, all the voices of your team muffled behind locked doors. You take a deep, slow breath. Your ears are ringing. Your head aches, a dull throb. It feels too full. The only time your mind is quiet is when you’re asleep and, these days, barely even then. 

You shove your hands into your pockets and head not to the elevator but to the stairs. Your legs burn constantly from doing little other than standing or running every day, but you like the tangibility of the ache, the grounding satisfaction of knowing you have worked hard. Whether there’s payoff or not. 

(Mostly there’s not. The Crabs are kind of what the professional splorts analysts call “a shitty team”, but whatever. It’s fine. You have all the time in the world to get better, and anyway you like the work or at least like it enough. You like the people you do it with, anyway, even when they keep you up until two in the damn morning.)

The lobby is empty except for the night clerk who nods in acknowledgment but thankfully doesn’t try to talk to you, so you nod back and push the glass front door open and breathe in. 

The air is—fresh, actually. More so than you’d expected. You’d forgotten for a while there that you’re in San Francisco rather than, say, New York or Mexico City. Not that it mattered, honestly; there aren’t a whole lot of times in blaseball where you’re allowed to, like, stop and take note of the AQI. 

But the air is fresh here and a little chilly, and a mist just heavy enough to settle gentle and cool on your skin has swept in during the night. You’re glad you buzzed your hair back in January so you could wear the batting helmet without too many issues; the moisture would have been hell on the carefully-maintained tight curls. There’s no wind, just the cold stillness. You wrap your arms around yourself and tilt your face up into the mist and exhale shakily. 

Other than the sounds of cars rushing through streets you cannot see, everything feels oddly quiet for a big city like this. It is so profoundly disengaged from everything your life has been for the last month and a half, so quiet and so empty and demanding nothing, that for a long moment you can’t do anything stare out blankly and, inexplicably, resist the sharp burn of tears. 

Slowly you recompose, draw in a long breath, lean against the outer wall next to the door just outside of where the light streams out the door of the hotel. Let your head drop back against the concrete. 

You are allowed approximately forty-three seconds of peace, looking up at stars not visible through the fog. Then, from the shadows of the wall on the left side of the door: 

“Hey. You play for the Crabs, right?”

You jump, then whip your head around to stare into the shadows, hand instinctively darting to your jacket pocket to curl around the handle of your jackknife. “Who’s there?” 

The figure edges forward so that the dim golden light from inside falls across her face, hands held up like _don’t shoot!,_ and when her leather jacket shifts aside, you can see the telltale pinstripes of a blaseball jersey. 

“Don’t worry, I’m a blaseball player too.” Maybe she’s trying not to smile, but she’s got an awful poker face, eyes crinkled up at the corners and mouth twitching. Smug, yeah, that much is obvious, but not particularly serious about it. “Just thought I’d come out and get some air. My room’s right next to some of your teammates, y’know. You guys ever sleep or is it like this all the time?” 

Cautiously, you shrug your hand out of your pocket and dryly say, “Usually it’s not.” Rolling your shoulders back, you regard the woman across the doorway. “My teammates have just chosen tonight specifically to be nightmarish.” 

The other woman raises her eyebrows and leans a shoulder against a doorframe. Settling in, probably. “Don’t you have a flight outta here in a few hours?” 

“Nope. One hour, if that.” The woman makes a sympathetic noise in response, and you tilt your head, considering her. “You said you’re a blaseball player. You’re not on the Lovers’ lineup, though. I’d have recognized you if you were.” 

She shrugs, movement loose and open. “Nope! I’m with the Garages. We got our asses kicked by the Steaks so hard and so fast today we managed to catch a last minute flight over from Dallas. Figured it’d be nice to sleep in.” Gives a wry twist of her lips. “But, well. Sleep is overrated anyway, I guess. Plus I’m not even pitching tomorrow, so it’s not like it matters too much.” 

“Oh,” you say, then realize. _“Oh._ You’re, uh, you’re Jaylen.” 

“Yep. Nice to meet you.” 

“Sutton.” You hold your hand out across the doorway. “Sutton Dreamy.” 

Half-grinning, Jaylen reaches out and shakes it. “Sutton,” she echoes, like she’s trying the name out in her mouth, and the smile turns into a true grin. “You can come over here, you know.” 

You roll your eyes, rock back on your heels. “Let me guess: you don’t bite?” 

Jaylen snickers. “Not unless y—” 

“Nope,” you say, lips tugging upward in spite of yourself. “Absolutely not.” 

She laughs anyway. “Well, offer’s on the table if you’re ever interested.” 

“Cute, but I’ll pass.” You still join her on the other side without protest, though, propping yourself up against the wall next to her. Jaylen’s taller than you are—not by much, but enough that you have to tilt your head back to look her in the eyes, and you’re already 5’11 so what the hell is up with _that_ —with chin-length dark hair that curls where it’s sticking out from under her electric-guitar-emblazoned blaseball cap. Written in black Sharpie on the scuffed brim is “PARK IT” with nine exclamation points and a little heart drawn next to it. 

“How’s the season going for the Crabs?” 

You grimace. “Oh, you know.” 

“Ah. Yeah.” 

“You?” 

“Oh, you know,” Jaylen echoes, smiling ruefully. “We're all doing our best, but the batting lineup needs some work. And the pitching rotation. All of it, I guess.” 

Arching an eyebrow, you nudge your shoulder against Jaylen’s. “You don’t have to be all coy about it. I mean, I’ve been listening to splorts podcasts during flights,” you say. “Everyone says you’re the best pitcher in the league.” 

Jaylen laughs again, this time quieter, and looks down at her field-muddy cleats. “Well. I don’t know about all that.” 

“You _are,”_ you insist. Apparently you have strong feelings about this. Who knew. “I mean, I’m glad I didn’t meet you for the first time on the field. I probably would’ve hated you for, like, months.” You’ve seen clips of her pitching on Twitter—she throws _fast._ And always straight into the strike zone, but never predictable. You don’t think anybody is exaggerating her skill. 

“That’s sweet. Still won’t stop me from striking you out in three pitches,” Jaylen grins. 

You snort. “You can certainly _try.”_ You’re one of the most overwhelmingly mediocre batters out there, no question, but that’s not relevant. You’ll hit a homer off her out of spite alone. 

She ducks her head, still smiling, and the conversation levels off into companionable silence. You don’t mind that, the mutual quiet. Paradoxically, it’s nice, sometimes, to share the want to be alone. Jaylen presses lightly against your side, and she’s warm, and you lean into her too without question. 

“‘S cold out,” Jaylen tells you anyway. 

You shrug. You don’t mind this either. Didn’t need the justification. 

Together, you watch the headlights pass on the road by the hotel. 

Soon enough, you’ll have to clamber back up five flights of stairs to her room and pack all your belongings into a suitcase and haul your whole life out to Chicago just to get your ass kicked by the Firefighters, and that’s fine. You legs are stiff from standing here this long and you’re huddled far too close together for strangers, and that’s fine too. There was something here that you had thought was lost to you entirely. This quiet, unquestioning warmth. You hadn’t noticed, really. How much you’d missed—

“D’you ever get tired of talking about blaseball?” you blurt, turning your head to look up at her. 

Jaylen drops her head back to thunk against the wall, eyes falling shut, and exhales out a sharp breath. “God. Every fuckin’ day, Sutton.” 

“Yeah,” you say softly and close your eyes too, let your head tip against Jaylen’s shoulder. “I love it. But yeah.” 

You stand there together like that for another five minutes until Jaylen sighs and carefully jostles you off her. “Alright, c'mon. You'd better get back to your team.” 

“Fine, fine.” You groan about as good-naturedly as you can manage at almost-three in the morning and push yourself upright, then turn to face her, still too close and still not stepping back. “Nice meeting you. For real.” 

Jaylen nods, eyes suddenly guarded. “You too.” She hesitates, then pulls her phone out of her jacket pocket and hands it to you, open to a new contact page. “Hey, call me sometime, okay? If you ever wanna… not talk about blaseball.” 

“Yeah,” you say, and smile. You type your number into her phone and hand it back, and her fingertips are careful when they rest, just for a moment, on your knuckles. “I think that’d be nice.” 

* * *

Jaylen pitches for the Crabs’ second game against the Garages a week and a half later. The Garages manage to drag a win out of you at the bottom of the tenth inning, and the Crabs all trudge back to the rooms reserved for them in the nearby Travelodge, arguing and complaining and arguing some more. It’ll be another messy, sleepless night, full of half-conscious strategizing and mulishness, and Parker will start drinking far too early and keep drinking far too late and be hungover for game three, and Kennedy will lecture all of you for it but it won’t make any difference. That’s the way of things. 

It’s a miserable game, a monstrous hours-long 3-3 tie with Jaylen’s pitching unerringly shutting out their hitters and the sheer mediocrity of the Garages’ hitters doing Montgomery’s job for them. It rains the whole time.

But the look on Jaylen’s face when you knock the ball straight into the outfield your first time at bat for a double is fucking _priceless._

(As the two teams file into their respective locker rooms after the game, Jaylen knocks her shoulder into yours, bends down so her lips brush over the shell of your ear, and mutters the name of a bar. She keeps walking without a backward glance, and you try not to watch her go. 

“Dude, what’s Jaylen’s _deal?”_ Valentine hisses at you as you both change back into your normal clothes, and you shrug, holding back a smile. Hell if you know.) 

* * *

You manage to disentangle yourself from your teammates just gracefully enough to slip away into the streets of Seattle with only Parker noticing, and they just jerk their chin up at you and turn back to the gaggle of other sweaty, pissed off jocks and don’t say a word. _Thank you, Parker._

Finding the bar isn’t too difficult after that. The version of Google Maps on the immaterial plane is and always will be _just_ inaccurate enough to inconvenience you, but you’ve spent your evenings in worse ways than wandering around Seattle. It’s the impatience that really gets you, anyway; your muscles are buzzing as you powerwalk through the crowded streets and you are inexplicably more anxious now than you have been before most games. God. It’s like being a teenager again. Somehow, the thought makes you smile just a little. 

Finally, _finally,_ you see the neon blue sign reading _Freeze_ and duck inside, weaving your way through the sparse weeknight crowd. It’s understated, none of the style and flair you might have expected from America’s favorite pitcher. Homey, mostly. Warm lighting despite the name. Jaylen’s tucked into a corner booth, fingers twisted together and resting on the table. Her head jerks up the second you walk in and she beams, waving you over. 

The first thing you say when you slide into the booth, shoving in next to her, is “So, what’s with all the secrecy?” 

She snorts. “Hello to you too.” She scoots a few inches to the right so you have room to sit down without being halfway off the seat, then adds, “And, you know. Just thinking about appearances.” 

You raise an eyebrow. “What about them?”

Jaylen laughs and turns to rest an elbow on the table, propping her chin up on her hand. “What it’d look like to people if I asked some random Crabs hitter to come to a bar with me." Brief pause. "Or back to my place.” 

“Scared people will get the wrong idea?” you grin, only half-joking. 

“Nah,” she says, and she holds your gaze. 

You lean back in your seat and let out a breath of a laugh. “Scared they’ll get the right one?” 

Jaylen shrugs, smile pulling unsubtly at the edge of her lips, and says nothing more.

“Good,” you say, grinning wider, and she laughs. You laugh too, this time for real, your face hot, and let the tension dissipate for now. “For the record, though, I’m not scared of any of that.” 

“Neither am I,” she protests, nudging her knee against yours. “Just saying, though. We _should_ probably keep being all secret and weird, at least until...” She trails off and laughs again, more awkwardly. “I don’t know. Later. Just—yeah.” 

You don’t press her. You think you’ve got the idea, and you want her to go back to smiling like she was before, so you say, “Honestly? I don’t even mind the secrecy. I think it’s kind of fun.” 

She grins. “Oh, good. Me too.” 

“But seriously, you could have just texted me to meet you here. I gave you my number. You didn’t need to do all the cloak and dagger shit.” 

Jaylen groans, turning her face into her palm. “Oh my God, _I had your number the whole time.”_

You snicker. “Very dramatic, though. I appreciated the effort.” 

“Oh shut up, don’t patronize me,” she grumbles, thwacking you on the arm. “Trysts are better like this anyway. If I can just text you where we’re gonna meet, what’s the _point?”_

“You’ve got me there,” you deadpan. “It’s way better when you shoulder-check me into a wall to seductively whisper in my ear with all of my teammates just, like, hanging around watching. So much more covert.” 

“Fine, fine, I’ll be more _subtle,”_ she complains. “I'll even pay for drinks. Are you happy?” 

“Yes,” you grin, relenting. You doubt that Jaylen has ever been subtle in her life about anything. She’s too noticeable. Too bright and self-possessed. Nothing about her is easily passed over. You’ve read as much negative stuff about her as you have positive at this point; for every starstruck reporter talking about her skill and unbreakable camaraderie with her teammates both on and off the field, you’ve got a critic talking about her rages, her unpredictable passions and sudden spells of isolation. She is beloved by all and is therefore hated. Every detail gets dredged up. Every second of her life is lived under the public eye. 

It makes sense that she's trying secrecy with you. Maybe it’s kind of touching, even if it won’t work. 

* * *

Jaylen does her best to disentangle herself from you without waking you up, but it’s a lost cause from the start. She clings to people like ivy when she sleeps, as it turns out, arm thrown up around your shoulders and ankle hooked over your shin and face pushed into your collarbone. It’s a wonder she could breathe, but you don’t mind people who cling, people who want to hold you so bad they do it unconsciously. So you wake up to semi-darkness and her carefully pulling her arm back, and you blink at her hazily. 

“Mornin’,” you say, after a couple seconds of her staring back at you with silent, owl-eyed surprise, like she’d thought somehow you wouldn’t notice the departure of your own personal space heater. “What time ‘s it?” 

“Early,” she says sheepishly. 

“How early.” 

“Like... 5 AM?” 

“Holy shit, what is _wrong_ with you?” you groan and flop onto your back. 

“I like going to the gym in the morning!” she says defensively, pushing herself up on her elbow. 

Resigning yourself to being awake, you sigh and roll back over to face her. “Jay, you’re a professional athlete. Don’t you get enough exercise?” 

“It’s nice to go to the gym on your own sometimes!” she protests. “I like running and there’s never enough time for that. Plus, for some reason my teammates never want to spar.” 

You snort. She’s six foot two and toned as hell and a superstar athlete; you really can’t _imagine_ why nobody wants to open themselves to the humiliation of being her sparring partner. 

But— “You spar?” 

She shrugs. “Sometimes. If people are up to it. You?” 

“Sometimes. I took up boxing…” You grimace. Memory. Self. Et cetera. “I don’t know. At some point. I’m a bit out of practice, but we can even go against each other if you’d like.” Her face lights up, and you roll your eyes. “Not at fuckin’ 5 AM, though, you masochist. Seriously, take a break, alright?” You hold out a hand to her and wait. 

“C’mon, it’d be so hot,” she complains, but she’s already sliding back into your open arms, still sleep-warm, bare skin soft against yours. “Like, you’d have me backed into a corner, and—” 

You laugh into her hair. “No being horny on main until the sun’s up.” 

“Killjoy,” she grumbles, but you can feel how her lips curl into a smile just at the base of your throat, and you laugh again.

* * *

There’s no such thing as a lazy morning for you. There hasn’t been since all this started. Any leisure has to be stolen—from your work, from sleep, from the few moments you would normally be using to eat. You don’t have friends outside of this, or at least you don’t anymore. Your family is gone. All you have is what you create, what you can survive carving out of this world for yourself. Take as much as you can carry and run. Hope that nobody catches you.

Now that the night is over, you and Jaylen are both livewires, crackling with unspoken tension that you suspect has more to do with the days ahead than any morning-after regrets.

But you try, for the first time in a long time, to be normal.

You wake her up with a kiss to the forehead, and she opens her eyes and smiles up at you, and together you get out of bed, dress yourselves. You steal a hoodie and gym shorts from her closet and don’t even try to be sneaky about it. She checks you out while you’re half-turned away from her and she doesn’t try to be sneaky about that, either, just laughs when you catch her looking and shrugs unrepentantly, like _hey, can’t help it!_ so you cross the cramped bedroom in three steps and kiss her until she sighs softly and rocks forward into you and you don’t have to stand on tiptoes anymore to reach her mouth, god _damn_ it, you’re used to being the tall one. 

You stay like that for a while, eventually moving to lean her back against the doorframe, and you sort of lose track of things until Jaylen pulls away suddenly with a noise of alarm. “Wait, fuck, what time is it?” 

“Don't know.” You crane your neck over to get a glimpse at the digital alarm clock on her nightstand, and your heart sinks. “Like, 8?” 

“Fuck,” she says again. “I gotta be on the field by 8:45.” 

“Fuck,” you echo, dropping your hand down from where it was resting against her ribs. “Me too.” 

From there, it’s a mess of her hunting for a clean jersey and you splashing water on your face and both of you trying not to run over her two cats in the mad scramble to get ready and her thumbing concealer onto her neck, snickering, and you half-jogging to the CVS down the street to buy some that’ll match your skin tone. She makes coffee for both of you while you’re out and guesses how you take it and gets it mostly right, and when you get back she insists on repaying the $7.96 you spent on the concealer. Grimacing, you pull on yesterday’s dirty clothes and brush your teeth with your finger, and then you’re going away again. 

But you tried.

You hesitate by the door as she’s sitting on the linoleum pulling on her shoes, and she stops, one foot in her Nikes and the other still in a plain black athletic sock. She looks up at you. 

There’s a sharp, keen wariness, the kind that never really seems to leave her face, but there’s vulnerability too, like maybe she’s just trying to protect herself. You don’t want her to need to protect herself from you. 

“So, uh,” you say, thumbs hooked into the pockets of your jeans. “Want to do this again next time I’m in town? Or vice versa, I guess. My apartment is a little less fancy, but we can’t all be mayors of major cities.” 

“The title’s honorary,” she says, brow furrowed, gaze fixed somewhere in the middle distance. “I’m not actually the mayor. Like, I double majored in exercise science and music. I don’t know shit about politics except that we should probably be unionizing right now.” 

‘Probably,” you agree, then wait. When it becomes evident she’s not planning on saying anything else, you say, “But do y—?” 

_“Oh!”_ she interrupts, blushing. “Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, I think that’d be nice.” 

“Cool.” You couldn’t hold back a smile even if you wanted to, and she gets to her feet and kisses you again, hands steady on your forearm and waist, and then she grins and says, “I’m still rooting against you, by the way,” and you say, “If the Crabs win, you buy me dinner next time,” and she says “Deal,” and that point you’re already late, so you run down the seven flights of stairs from her apartment and wave up at her window from the street, and you jog to the whole way to the field and Combs lectures you for being late anyway, and you don’t even care, because you can see Jaylen in the other dugout, and she gives you a little wave when her teammates’ backs are turned, and yeah, you’re gonna win this game if it kills you. 

* * *

It quickly becomes evident that neither the Crabs nor the Garages are making the playoffs even if they haven’t been formally mathematically eliminated yet, and somehow that makes it easier. Not that you’d ever thought you _were_ going to make it that far. But having the confirmation means you can ease off a bit, much to the dismay of Combs. Practices get shorter and less frequent. Games are fine—either you’re playing one of the few teams worse than you or you’re just being a punching bag for the Pies or whoever else. 

You spend more time in Seattle. Jaylen spends more time in Baltimore. 

You’re halfway moved in with each other, and you still haven’t really talked about it. It’s just that she keeps her big, well-worn leather jacket hanging on a hook by your door, and you’ve got a few sets of clothes crammed into her dresser. She knows your phone number by heart, which might not have meant anything a decade ago but it’s touching now. She’ll call you from a payphone every Wednesday night that you’re not in the same city since she’s constantly forgetting her cell phone charger in hotel rooms so her phone’s dead 80% of the time, and she refuses to learn from her mistakes. 

You’ll talk for a full hour most times, you on some motel bed keeping your other ear plugged with your free hand to block out the din of your teammates and her leaned into the corner of a phone booth. She never lets you cover the metric ton of change she must be burning through. You try it once, venmo her fifteen bucks after a call, and she sends it right back the second her phone’s charged again. She says she just doesn't wanna owe anything, and when you try to argue with her on that during your next phonecall she hangs up on you (and yeah, your phone's ringing again within thirty seconds, but you get the point). 

You know that sometimes the only reason she calls you is because she can’t be alone with just her own thoughts. She knows about the anxiety meds in your gym bag that you have to carry around with you everywhere you go. 

But you still haven’t talked about it, _it_ meaning you, _it_ meaning the two of you together. 

To your credit, after the third night you spent together, you _had_ rolled over and asked, “Hey, so are we a thing?” 

She smiled in a way that made her nose wrinkle up and said, “Are you asking me if we’re dating?” 

“Yeah, I guess.”

Jaylen laughed and lifted her shoulder in a lazy shrug, fingers tracing up and down your arm. “I’ve taken you out on dates. Like, probably the textbook definition of a date. Dinner and everything.” 

You’d chuckled, shivering at the touch, and said, “Thought I’d ask anyway.” 

That was the end of that. No terms, no specific boundaries, no idea of what the future would be. You hadn’t minded much. It was nice to, for once, not worry about exactly what you should and shouldn’t be doing. You and Jaylen figure it out as you go. If you do something that makes her uncomfortable, she tells you then and there. Same for you. It’s just easy in the way so few things in your life are allowed to be. 

You’d thought you’d at least be stressed about keeping it from your team, but they don’t seem to care too much. Kennedy sits next to you on a flight once, and he asks you casually where you go whenever the Crabs are in Seattle, and your face gets hot and you make up some bullshit about _just really liking the city, honestly I could see myself living there at some point in the future, plus the music scene’s really good with the Garages and all so why would I stay cooped up in a hotel room?_ like you all don’t visit infinitely cooler cities on the regular, and he probably (definitely) doesn’t believe you but he doesn’t push you on it. 

He asks you if you’ve seen the Garages perform live. Thankfully, you have. You kinda like the nostalgic early aughts garage rock vibe they have going on, and you tell him as much. You do not tell him about the hot bass guitar player that you are dating. He relents. You spend the rest of the flight talking to him about tarot. 

Winnie teases you about sleeping with a Garages player, so you laugh and say that if you were getting any, you’d be way more smug about it. She cackles and elbows you and rambles about her fling with some guy on the Moist Talkers. But that’s about the extent of it. Everyone else is too wrapped up in their own private dramas to worry about yours, and you almost have to wonder how much you’re missing in return. 

* * *

“So,” you say, and you hate to always be the one bringing it up, but you don’t know any other way to be. “When do we go public?” 

Jaylen is quiet, but her grip on you tightens and you curl back into it reflexively. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t have a plan for it. Just—ugh, I don’t want to feed into the damn rumor mill.” More quietly: “I want to have something that’s just _mine.”_

With anybody else, the possessiveness might have unnerved you. But this is Jaylen, who keeps no secrets, who always lets you go when you ask, so you understand. 

* * *

The day the Crabs manage at long last to get mathematically eliminated from the ILB championship, they throw a party. It’s what’s done, apparently—the Hawai’i Fridays did it, the Los Angeles Tacos did it, the Miami Dale did it. Kennedy thinks it’s weird as all hell to celebrate defeat, but that’s because Kennedy doesn’t know what fun is. 

So you all throw a party and invite every blaseball team passing through a thousand-mile radius, and a surprising number of them show up. Shoe Thieves, Tigers, Sunbeams, Garages. Definitely way too many people for Valentine’s little split-level, but they take it in stride, let everyone cluster in the kitchen and bedroom and living room and on the front lawn and in the backyard with its scraggly dandelions and its grass that hasn’t been mowed in months. They scrape together a campfire and even let everyone crack into their frankly intimidating liquor cabinet. Someone from the Garages brings a beat-up acoustic guitar because of course, and half the crowd heckles him endlessly about the cliché but still ends up requesting songs late into the night as the guy just does his damn best to keep up. 

Jaylen’s there too. Sits next to you by the campfire and very carefully doesn’t lean too close. Jaylen being Jaylen, she’s among the hecklers, good-naturedly bullying the guy about his fingerpicking and threatening to snap his neck like a twig if he plays “Wonderwall”. 

The guy—Mike, you recognize his face from publicity photos, Mike Townsend, Jaylen's roommate—so strange, to just now be meeting him—sticks out his tongue at her and starts fumbling out the opening chords. _Today is gonna be the day—_

He’s not particularly good at it, if you’re being honest, especially now that he’s tipsy. Lots of muted strings and chords that come out a little funny by mistake, but fuck it. It’s a sweet song, and everyone is huddled around the campfire, shoulders bumping together, and their faces are lit up warm orange, and Jaylen is singing and so is everyone else. _And all the roads we have to walk are winding, and all the lights that light the way are blinding._ You can pick out her voice in the cacophony, low and a little gravelly, more tenor than you’d expect from just seeing her face. You sing too. 

You all sound like straight garbage as a group, off-key and off-tempo in the way any big drunken crowd will be. _‘Cause maybe you’re gonna be the one that saves me._ But there’s something about it. Everyone sways back and forth, just a bit, and they bellow out these cheesy fuckin’ lyrics, and the discordant voices blend into something more, like the hymn of a congregation, like the chant of fans in a stadium. The first ever playoffs start in three days, and just for here and just for now, none of you are rivals. 

Mike Townsend plays “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” next. Maybe you almost cry when everyone keeps singing with him. Maybe you still aren’t sure why. Maybe Jaylen teases you about it as you both stumble back to your place at three in the morning as the party winds down. Maybe you try to kiss her to shut her up but sort of miss, and she laughs at you even harder, and you both fall asleep on your sofa because you’re too tired to make it to your bed, legs tangled up and her breath puffing soft against your collarbone. Maybe it feels like an ending. Maybe it feels like a beginning.

You don’t remember, looking back. Sometimes it’s easier to try and forget what’s happy. Makes what’s sad a little easier to deal with. 

* * *

The Pies win the championship that year. Everybody comes to see, every single blaseball player and blaseball fan and anyone else they could drag with them, it seems like. They all haul themselves out to Philly and cram into Tastykake Stadium and watch the Pies just absolutely destroy the Chicago Firefighters. The Pies don’t lose once in the postseason, but everyone watches Cedric Gonzalez slide home one final time and the whole crowd is on its feet screaming itself hoarse like they’d been at twenty innings tied the whole way, because you _all_ made it to the end, not just the Pies. The first season is over, and you all played it through. Every team rushes the field en masse. 

It’s all a mess of colors—balloons and streamers pouring down from the top of the stadium, and the sun is dipping behind the walls in a pink-orange sky as Jaylen drags you forward by the hand. You’re dwarfed by her oversized leather jacket, well-worn and permanently scuffed, and you’re holding her hand in front of God knows how many reporters, and you’re probably looking at her like she hung the moon, but you can’t bring yourself to care in the midst of the ecstatic shouts of the players around you, the teammates colliding in hugs, Cedric hoisting the trophy over his head somewhere in the middle of it all, laughing with disbelieving joy. Uniforms flash past you, blue and purple and yellow and orange and red and lime green. 

Jaylen stops suddenly on the pitcher’s mound and hugs you fiercely, face buried in your short hair, and she’s giggling a little hysterically but she’s whispering, _“I’m so glad you’re here, I’m so glad you’re here with me to see it—”_ and you’re pulling back to look at her, feeling like you’ve missed something essential but giggling with her anyway. It’s as you’re doing so that you look up to the scoreboard behind her, its screen gone suddenly cold and black. The celebratory din of the crowd dies down into a dull roar of confusion as stark white text types itself out: 

ELECTION RESULTS. 

“What, already?” Jaylen says, still half-laughing. “I thought those wouldn’t be out until tomorrow at the earliest.” 

SEASON ONE. 

THE DECREE: 

_OPEN THE FORBIDDEN BOOK._

_IT IS FORBIDDEN._

HAS PASSED WITH 61%. 

The fans are cheering from the stands, and something settles cold in your stomach. 

YOU HAVE OPENED THE FORBIDDEN BOOK. 

“What?” you say, and Jaylen frowns up at the scoreboard and doesn’t say anything. “No, wait, what did we open?” The sky behind the board goes dark. No more sun. Her fingers tighten around yours, hard. 

You look up to see her eyes widen, just for a second, and then the light is too white-hot to look at her any longer.

* * *

You end up in the hospital. The burns are pretty bad. 

“It’s a miracle that it’s not any worse,” the doctor says as she finishes up bandaging your hand. “Especially considering how close you were to the heat source. You’re very lucky that you jumped away as quickly as you did.” Heat source. That’s one way of saying it. The lights in here are buzzing, so faint that your senses barely manage to pick it up, but they itch at the inside of your skull. 

“Yeah,” you say. “Guess so.” 

There’s a television mounted in the upper left corner of the room, just over the door. It’s off right now, but you’re itching to ask for a remote. You’re wondering about the news. You’re wondering about instant replays. Your teammates are clustered in the waiting room and have been for about an hour, even beat the ambulance on the way here, and now that you’re slightly less catatonic with pain you feel guilty about keeping them waiting. 

Though her voice betrays nothing, the doctor is watching you with pitying eyes. “It’ll be a difficult next few weeks. Normally, a second-degree burn such as this wouldn’t require as much care, but considering the severity of this burn in particular and its location on your hand, you might consider getting somebody to help you with day to day tasks.” 

“Oh.” You hadn’t considered that. “Okay.” 

“You may find it difficult to dress yourself, cook, and so forth. It’s also difficult to change the dressings on hand wounds alone. I recommend recruiting a friend, family member, partner, or wh—” 

“Yes,” you interrupt tersely. “I get it. Can I see my teammates now?” 

She nods. “Of course. Only a few at a time, but—” 

“Please. I just—please.” You’re too exhausted to fight, crunched up in a hospital bed like this, but you can’t just—they have to— 

The doctor sighs, chews on the inside of her cheek, then says, “Alright. All of them, but only for a few minutes. Then only two visitors at once, and I _will_ enforce that.” 

“Thank you,” you say softly. She nods and leaves the room. 

Two minutes later, everyone’s packed themselves in as a unit, circling your bed, and for a moment you kind of regret asking them all to come in. They look rough. Every single one of them does. Kennedy’s bitten his lower lip bloody, and Valentine’s wringing their hands, and Parker’s to the point of pacing back and forth at the foot of your bed, and they’re all looking at you like you know something they don’t or like you’re at death’s door. 

“Hi guys,” you say because apparently, despite everything, you’re gonna have to be shouldering the conversational load here. “How’s it going?” 

Kennedy snorts. “About as well as it looks, Sutton. You?” 

You lift your bandaged hand up slightly, raising your eyebrows. “About as well as it looks.” 

Combs leans over, hand hovering just under, but not quite touching, yours. “How bad’s the burn?” 

“Somewhere on the line between second and third degree.” You try to muster up a smile. “Wish it would just pick one or the other. Third’s worse in the long run, but the total destruction of the nerves in my hand would at least mean it wouldn’t hurt, you know?” 

Combs sighs, eyes closed. “That’s not funny.” 

“Fine. What happened after the Book got opened?” you ask the team at large, and they all look to Kennedy, who grimaces. 

He waits a long time before speaking. “It’s, um—we’re still not sure entirely. It’s bad, though.” 

You laugh, far more shakily than you’d like. “Yeah, no shit, but what happened?” 

“You’re still in shock,” Kennedy says, jamming his hands into his pockets. “I don’t want to say anything that would—” 

“Just tell me. I’ll have to hear about it at some point.” You take a deep breath, and that shudders too. “I was h—I was right next to Jaylen when she caught fire. Nothing you can say is going to be….” You trail off and squeeze your eyes shut. “Just tell me.” 

Hesitantly, Kennedy puts a comforting hand on your shoulder. “Well, um. A hellmouth devoured Moab. There was a solar eclipse, which is gonna be happening a lot more now. The umpires have gone rogue and can apparently kill any of us at will during said solar eclipses. And, um, as you saw, Jaylen was the first… victim of that. We’re in the Discipline Era now, and nobody knows what that even means, but it’s where we are, and everything is—” He breathes in slowly. “We’re going to figure it out together, alright? We’ll work it out.” 

“Oh,” you say. There doesn’t seem to be anything else left _to_ say. 

“We’ve got a good few months til the next season,” Winnie says earnestly after a moment of silence. “You’ll be all better by then. Plus, it’s your glove hand, so even if it’s _really_ bad you can still probably bat—” 

“Don’t,” you say, and you drop your head back against your pillows. “No blaseball talk. Please just. Don’t.” 

* * *

In the end, Kennedy’s the one who ends up caring for you. No family, no friends outside the Crabs, and certainly no partner, so your team captain has to do. He drives you home from the hospital the next day and moves into your apartment without complaint, just borrows some of your spare blankets and sleeps on the couch, arms tucked cleanly against his chest, legs never sprawling. He very carefully takes up as little space in your life as possible, and you resent him for it almost as much you appreciate it. You want so badly for him to fuck up, do something worth yelling about, but he never does. He keeps cooking you dinner and doing your shopping and helping you into sweatpants each morning and carefully buttoning your flannels and wrapping your hand up in a garbage bag when you need to shower. 

He’s not even weird about it, just quiet and methodical the way he is with everything. Each night, you force him to watch _The Room_ or any other horrid movie you can think of with you just to goad him into denying you something, and he doesn’t. 

After the credits roll on _Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2,_ though, he turns to you and simply asks, “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” you say, loudly crunching popcorn. 

“You know what.” He looks at you over the nerd glasses he wears whenever he watches TV or reads. It’s like talking to a disappointed middle school teacher. 

“Fuck, _fine,”_ you burst out after about fifteen seconds of silence. “I’m just double checking that you’re still, like, human. You don’t have to indulge me on everything, you know.” 

“I know,” he says. “But you just lost somebody important to you, and I’m—” 

“That’s not a reason for you to—hang on, _what?”_

Kennedy sighs, sharp, and folds his arms over his chest. “I’m not completely oblivious.” 

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” you snap, and Kennedy sighs again. 

“I change your bandages, it’s not like I don’t—Sutton, the burn is in the shape of a _hand._ Yes, the lines are kind of rough, but isn’t… easily mistakable, okay? The fingers are defined enough.” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you say, but you can’t choke back the lump in your throat forever. “I don’t, it’s not…” 

“You were wearing her jacket.” His voice is so gentle it makes you want to scream. “You had a Garages uniform in your dirty laundry. There’s still a spare toothbrush by the sink. You don’t have to pretend you aren’t grieving somebody you loved. Not around me.” 

“How long have you known?” 

He shrugs. “Dunno. I’ve _suspected_ for months. I mean, I love you, Sutton, but neither of you are particularly subtle people.”

“Fuck you, I’m plenty subtle,” you protest, but your heart isn’t in it. 

“Whenever she was within a hundred square miles of you, you would never be with the rest of the team. You went home together after the party at Valentine’s. You sat with her during almost every postseason game, and you wore her jacket more often than you didn’t. It was cute, honestly, but you clearly didn’t want any of us to know about it—” 

Your stomach sinks. “That’s not fair.” 

“Maybe not, but it’s true,” Kennedy says, voice still devastatingly kind. “I don’t blame you for it, though. The press wouldn’t have been kind to either of you, and the news would have gotten to them exponentially quicker if you or she had told the teams.” He shifts forward, takes your uninjured hand in his, and squeezes. “I don’t condemn you, okay? I just don’t want you to be alone. Lean on me. That’s what I’m here for.” 

“Thank you,” you say, and you can feel your voice strangling itself in your chest, and you press the back of your bandaged hand against your forehead, closing your eyes. “I’m sorry.” 

“Don’t be,” he says, and either you hug him or he hugs you. You don’t know who collapses into who first, but you are holding each other, here on the couch, and you aren’t crying but you bury your face in the collar of his old grey flannel anyway. “You were happy. That’s all I wanted for you.” 

* * *

Eventually, though, Kennedy does have to leave you to live alone. The day he moves out, you book a last minute flight and drag yourself across the country to Seattle and set about the task of cleaning out Jaylen’s apartment, but half the job is already done. Theodore Duende adopted her cats, Absolute Destruction (Abby for short) and Vacuum Cleaner (you’ve tried to nickname him too but he will not answer to literally anything else). Mike would've taken custody of them since he is—was—her roommate, but he's allergic anyway, so without Jaylen what was the point of keeping them?

Most of her clothes have been donated by the time you show up. Her blaseball cap went up in flames when she did. 

The door swings open when you try it. It’s been left unlocked. 

Mike looks up from the kitchen cabinets where he’s boxing up some of the dinnerware. “Oh, hey!” he exclaims, setting down a teal-glazed ceramic plate. “It's, uh—" He snaps once, twice, then grins. "Sutton Dreamy, right? From the Crabs?” 

“Yeah,” you say. “I’m here to…” You trail off and gesture at the apartment at large. Your right hand is still bandaged and flexing or bending it is hard, but you can at least sort of carry things with it as long as they don’t dig in too much. 

“Huh,” Mike says. “Okay.” He turns toward the bedroom and hollers, _“HEY! TEDDY!_ C’mon out, we’ve got one of the Crabs batters saying she’s here to help!” You shift uncomfortably, and he must notice because he smiles sheepishly. “Sorry, I shouldn’t’ve yelled. How’d you know Jaylen?” 

“Uh—” you start, but then Theodore’s jogging down the hallway into the kitchen, and he squints at you. 

“What’re you doing here?” 

“I’m here to help like Mike said. Jaylen was my. Friend.” 

“Friend?” Theodore asks, his voice giving nothing away. You decide you hate telling people about this. 

“We were together,” you inform them curtly, and you lift up your burnt hand. “I was holding her hand when she got incinerated. So.” 

“Oh,” Theodore says. 

“Huh,” Mike says again. You scan his expression for a reaction, but his face has shuttered off. You remember, with sudden clarity, that Jaylen had always. called Mike her best friend. Said they didn't keep secrets. Except you. But.

“Yeah,” you say. “I'd appreciate if you didn't tell anybody." You wait for them to nod, then clear your throat, drop your hand. "So. Can I help?” 

You get to work. 

Her trinkets are split between the teammates, but nobody really wants to take any of it. It's just that it would feel wrong to give it to strangers. You missed the funeral, as it turns out, which is probably for the best; you don’t know if you could have sat there for two hours with nothing to do but stare at the urn they probably put her in, ashes mixed up with the scorched dirt of the pitcher’s mound. Mike and Theodore don’t meet your eyes much, but you hadn't expected anything else. They know you about as much as you know them, which is to say they don’t know you at all. 

Fine. You take the necklace with her grandfather’s simple gold wedding ring on it. You take her dying aloe plant. You take the faded navy blue band tee you would always steal when you slept over at her place. You don’t take the blaseball card of herself that she’d framed on her bedroom wall as a joke or the _Hotdogfingers for Mayor 2018!_ poster tacked up in the hallway or the blaseball from the first game she pitched with the Garages or her bass guitar, sleek and red as blood.

Her wallet and ID were in the pocket of the leather jacket during the final game, and when Mike anxiously brings up that nobody’s found them yet, you don’t say anything. You think you’re going to hold onto them. Just in case. You close your eyes and try not to think about why.

* * *

You move on. There are no other options. Dwelling is a thing of the past. You get really, really good at grieving the incinerated. 

Everybody does. 

* * *

You move on. You still wear her shirt around your apartment. You still pull on her jacket whenever you go grocery shopping. You still nurse her aloe back to health, and you make sure it stays alive. You still follow Theodore on Twitter and like all the photos he posts of Abby and Vacuum Cleaner. 

(Mike had offered, extremely awkwardly, to be there if you ever needed someone to talk to and gave you his phone number. He's trying, if nothing else. You don’t call, but you still hover your thumb over his contact sometimes before clicking your phone off and tossing it to the other side of the bed.) 

* * *

Jaylen is holding you because she always held you when she got the chance, and this time you’re facing her, chin tipped up so it rests on top of her head, and she’s breathing slowly and evenly against your throat, but she’s awake, you can tell by the way her fingers are moving back and forth over your spine. 

“What’re you thinkin’ about?” you whisper, and she shifts to look at you, grinning guiltily. 

“Don’t get mad at me, but blaseball again,” Jaylen admits, huffing out a tired laugh. “I swear it’s like I can’t stop.” You swat at her bicep in joking rebuke, and she sighs. “I know, I know, I’m sorry. I just, like—top of the third, I could’ve pitched better, I _know_ I could have. But I got thrown off ‘cause Nagomi was first up to bat and she’s, like, intimidating as all hell, she’s even taller than I am and _way_ buffer, which, not to brag, is _saying_ something, and she was glaring at me. She’s unfairly good as a batter too. I got psyched out especially after she got a hit off my first throw. Plus she looked like she was gonna try and steal my lunch money if I pulled anything.” 

“Jay, babe, you’re twenty-eight.” 

“She would _totally_ steal my lunch money,” Jaylen whines. 

You laugh. “No, she’s super nice! She seems all ominous and stoic but I talked to her at one of those preseason parties for, like, an hour one time.” 

“On all levels except physical, Nagomi Mcdaniel has stolen my lunch money. On a physical level, she’s stolen four bases from me total in a single game which is almost worse.” Sighs again and shakes her head, mutters, “We just gotta make it to the playoffs.” She’s always saying that, like some kind of mantra. 

You flick her shoulder. “Make the playoffs next season. Stop thinking about blaseball.” 

“Then give me something more fun to think about!” she complains, eyes gleaming, so you do. 

* * *

Anyways, it’s the memories that are the worst part. You keep expecting them to fade as the years go on. They never have. 

* * *

The Crabs do the one thing you never expected the Crabs to do: get good. 

You don’t really get good with them. Which—sucks. More than you would have expected. Practicing doesn’t seem to do a lot. It’s all blessings; those are the only things that seem to help in any way that matters. People get buffed, teams get shuffled around. Players go up in smoke, and their replacements are better, and just having that thought makes you feel sick. 

But even with a very middling batter still clinging stubbornly to their lineup, the Crabs get good. Not just good, either. They get great. They get into playoffs and championships. They become capital-c Contenders. 

It’s enough to give you damn whiplash, but you aren’t complaining. These people are your friends, and this is the splort you love. The Crabs look after their own, fuck everybody else, and it’s finally paying off. You’re your own bizarre little family, who cares that you never had your own that you can remember. Sliding home, the grit rubbing your skin raw—Combs, wrapping you up in a hug after you hit a rare home run—Kennedy, clapping you on the back after a long practice—the heft of a bat in your hands—Valentine and Nagomi, tossing a ball back and forth with you in the middle of a crowded airport terminal—Parker, cracking a joke so bad you almost cry laughing—the fans clamoring for your autograph, for your smile—the whole team after a ten-game winning streak, staring around at each other in dazed, jubilant awe—

It’s not awful. Of course it’s not all awful after she’s gone and the world goes wrong. 

You have to go on somehow, you _have_ to, so you find the joy in the grief and the endless bloodstained days and the scream of feedback and the nights where you can’t get the smell of smoke out of your nose, and you hold on as hard as you can.

* * *

“Hey,” Tillman calls out to the team as he wrestles his locker open. “The shit the fans are trying to pull with Jaylen’s fuckin’ wild, huh?” 

You don’t realize you’ve slammed your locker door shut until the metal is shaking under your fingers, and every head in the room snaps to look at you and then away as soon as you meet their eyes. You turn back to the lockers, unseeing. 

“What are they trying with Jaylen?” you say blankly to the locker in front of you. “And why did nobody tell me about it?” 

Someone sighs, and without even looking you know it’s Kennedy. You are well acquainted with his sighs. “We thought you would have already known.” 

You laugh, and you know you sound fucking demented, but you can’t find it within yourself to care. “You think I keep up with that bullshit, Kennedy? I’m so tired of this damn game, I don’t—” 

“The knowledge is widespread now,” Oliver says, and even his automated voice is irritable. “It is on every news site, not just splorts blogs. Necromancy does tend to make the front page.” 

“Sorry, _necromancy?”_ Your voice is bordering on a shriek, so you bite down hard on your tongue and try again, dangerously measured. “What. Exactly. Do you mean by necromancy?” 

Kennedy rubs at his temples. “You know this season’s blessing, the one that lets you steal a player from the fourteenth spot on the idol board and switch them onto your team?” 

“Yeah. Sure.” 

“Well. It turns out Jaylen’s still playing.” 

* * *

“So, same time next week?” 

“Yeah, works for me. Are you sure you don’t get tired? The time zones are—” 

“I’m always tired. Doesn’t make much difference to me. Look, can I at least pay you back? I looked it up, I know this costs money.” 

“Nope. I got all the quarters I need. You don’t owe me anything. ‘Night, I lo—’night.” 

“Wait, what were y—” 

She’s already gone.

* * *

The next few games are clumsy, and that’s probably the kindest way to put it. Kennedy doesn’t lecture you about it, which you’re thankful for, but you can’t ignore the worried glances your teammates throw you when they think you aren’t looking, and you can’t ignore the whispers either. Apparently it really was common knowledge. You’re sitting in the dugout watching the scoreboard, and sure enough, when the display flashes to the idol leaderboard, there’s her name in white text, sitting at number fourteen. Her team is listed as Null. There is a flaming skull next to her name, and your right palm aches. 

Five years and the burn scar never faded, barely even became less obvious. It’s lighter than the rest of your skin, standing out starkly against clay brown, and your hand is stiff and inflexible where the sections of the flesh melted and fused together. The ghost of fingers curled between your knuckles, the pale shadow of a thumb resting on the inside of your wrist. Nobody outside the old guard of the Garages and the Crabs knows for certain what it means, but you’ve seen speculation. Fantastic tales, sure—Sutton Dreamy, marked by a ghost, some gruesome angel’s kiss—but not totally incorrect either. That’s blaseball, you guess. Nothing is ever entirely out of question. Every horrific absurdity has its grain of truth. 

* * *

You lost touch with the Garages after the end of the first season. Mostly just tried to forget they existed. You’re pretty sure they don’t resent you for that. Anyway, what do they care if a middling Crabs batter is ignoring them? The Crabs are just like that as a whole. You know, crabby. It’s kind of their brand. 

But the Garages play with unprecedented ferocity that sixth season, and you watch them say, over and over, “We just gotta make it to the playoffs, we just gotta make it to the playoffs, _we just gotta make it to the playoffs,”_ and it echoes somewhere in your ribcage like a phantom pain. 

Sometimes they add the _“for Jaylen”,_ sometimes they don’t, but it’s always implied: we just gotta make it to the playoffs _for Jaylen,_ we gotta make it because that’s she always said, because that’s what she wanted, because that’s what we would’ve done if she were still here, because that’s what we’re going to do when we get her back, because Jaylen holds at fourteenth. 

Barely any of these people ever knew her, but that doesn’t stop them from screaming her name. You wonder what she would have thought about that. Becoming not a person but a rallying point. A martyr. A god, or something you tell yourself so you can go to sleep easier. Same thing, you think, and Jaylen holds at fourteenth.

The Garages make it to the playoffs. Hell, they make it to the _championship,_ and you’re facing them down for the first time in years, them in their familiar grey and blue and red and you in the same burgundy-crabshell. They retired forty-six as a uniform number after Jaylen, but they have it smeared on their cheeks now anyway in paint the color of fire. _Remember number forty-six,_ they scream, sweeping every team on the way up to you. They sing their memorial songs, raise their fists in the air. Their fans bay like hunting dogs, and Jaylen holds at fourteenth. 

You sweep them to win your first championship and rejoice. Their manic grins don’t so much as waver. And Jaylen holds at fourteenth. 

* * *

Her hand goes still on the curve of your hip. “You ever think about running away?” 

You open your eyes and twist your neck a little so you can look her in the eyes, blinking through the darkness. “What, from blaseball?” 

“I dunno. Like, from life in general. So, yeah, I guess just blaseball.” 

“Are you being serious right now?” 

She laughs awkwardly and turns her head away. “I’m—it’s stupid. You don’t have to—”

“No, it’s not stupid, just—this is your life, Jaylen. Everyone loves you.” 

“But we could do it.” 

“Yeah. I guess we could.” 

* * *

The election results aren’t so immediate anymore. Maybe the gods did what they did that first season for shock value. Probably wanted everybody in one place celebrating for when they made themselves known, just to make it hurt more than it would’ve already. Probably wanted to make an example out of her. 

No, you all have to wait two weeks for election results these days, and then you have to pile back into the stadium where the championship game took place. Every team, every player. It’s the Crabitat this year. Nobody touches each other, they’ve learned that lesson well, but they lean desperately close, eyes wild and glossy. You flex your burnt hand. 

The Commissioner takes the stage. He’s barely more than a kid, Parker. Job given to him by his parents. Nepotism, but hey, 'the Commissioner is doing a great job', right? It would probably be scarier if the guy in charge of all this was actually competent. 

You watch him take a breath to steel himself before unfolding the paper crammed into his pocket and flattening it against the podium. “Congratulations to the Crabs,” he says, voice echoing oddly off the walls of the massive stadium. The crowd cheers, deafening, and Parker talks over them blithely. “I hope you all enjoyed your, uh, parade. Now on to the decree.” He smooths the paper out again and clears his throat. “Enhanced Party Time won with 77% of the votes.” 

The crowd bellows its approval, and the Commissioner winces. “Ow. Take it easy. Okay. Uh, blessings…” 

Someone pushes the Night Vision Goggles into your hands, grinning, and then you zone out. You don’t give a shit about who gets stolen from where and which stat boosts go to what team. The gasps that ripple through the masses of people don’t concern you. 

“Lottery Pick!” the Commissioner announces over the increasing agitation of the crowd. People are swapped, different jerseys appearing over the old. Lineups get mixed up. It’s always a mess, this section of the ceremony. “Lottery Pick! Uh…” He picks up his notebook paper and squints at it, then intones:

“FIRE AND SMOKE. 

AN EGG, HATCHING.

JAYLEN HOTDOGFINGERS RETURNS. 

MIKE TOWNSEND RETREATS TO SHADOWS.”

Then he coughs, thumping the center of his chest with a closed fist, and speaks again. “The Garages win with 58% of the vote.” He blinks out at the crowd. “Congrats.” 

And sure, you’d been expecting it, but all the air rushes out of you nonetheless, and Kennedy’s at your side immediately to steady you. “She’s back,” you whisper aloud to nobody at all. You just want to say it. “She’s alive.” There’s a hysterical laugh shuddering on the edge of every breath, but you can’t let it out now. 

“Where is she?” Kennedy mumbles into your ear, a hand braced on your lower back to keep you from falling over. “I can’t see her on the field.” 

“I don’t see Mike either,” you manage. _Gone already?_ Of course it would be Mike giving himself up for her. Unbidden, a memory resurfaces—Mike, weary but still smiling at you over a cardboard box in Jaylen’s emptying apartment. He had a kind smile. You can’t remember what color his eyes were. 

The Garages are screaming at the tops of their lungs, slamming their hands and bodies wildly against the barrier between the audience and the field, and Mike’s not with them, and the Commissioner is letting it happen, shoulders hunched as he stares down at his paper. “Give her a minute,” he says, half under his breath. 

The pitcher’s mound begins to churn. 

It cracks like an egg splintered from the inside out, and a body is spat from the center. It lands hard in the short-cropped grass in front of the mound and lies there, limp.

It’s too far away to see properly, but you know. Who else could it be? The body covered in dirt, wearing a dull grey jersey, and even from here you can make out the flaming skull stretching over its spine. 

The corpse twitches, reaches out an arm, and shoves itself to kneeling. It lifts its head up, shaking, and takes off its cap. 

“Hello?” it croaks out to the dead silent stadium. 

The crowd _roars._

* * *

You wander around the field waiting for everybody to clear out afterwards. You’re walking the bases: first, second, third, home. First, second, third, home. First, second, third, home. Your legs ache. You always thought you’d adjust to that, but it’s been six years and you haven’t managed it yet. The rest of the Crabs leave you to it, maybe at Kennedy’s behest, maybe just because they sense that you are simply not with them for the moment. 

The Garages had rushed the field immediately after Jaylen spoke, hopping the barrier and carrying her off on their shoulders to the locker rooms. She’d looked barely conscious, and your gut had twisted watching how her head flopped back as Theodore hoisted her up. They’re nursing her back to health now, probably. Debriefing. Getting her clean clothes, the first food and water she’s had in years, letting her rest. Making sure she’s out of the public eye, at least for now. 

You know—you know it’s not your place to be there. They got her back, after all, not you. They’re the ones who gave up time and money and an entire human life to bring her home. It’s a moment for the team, the family. Half the Garages are new kids anyway. They wouldn’t get why you’re there, why you _need_ to be there, and you’re not inclined to tell them. 

Still. You’re waiting for them. If only because you can’t imagine leaving this place knowing she’s still in here. 

The clouds rolled in somewhere in the middle of the ceremony. Not the type that portend storms, just the type that sit overhead and turn the whole world grey. It’s dim. Late afternoon. You don’t see the Garages player until he’s right in front of you. Oliver Mueller. You can half-remember him from the lineup and some of the gigs you went to back during the first season. He did some weird ska shit back then. He still looks so young. 

“Hi,” he says, giving you a nervous little wave. “Teddy said you’d probably be out here.” 

“Jaylen’s awake?” 

“She’s been awake,” Oliver says. “We’ve been trying to, um. Reorient her.” 

“Is she okay?” You’re already striding toward the away team’s dugout, and he scurries to keep up with you. 

“About as okay as you can hope for, all things considered,” he says, a bit out of breath. “She’s kinda dazed. I mean, so many years of missing time—so much has changed—she doesn’t recognize a quarter of the team—” 

“Okay,” you say, as unwavering as you can manage, and you jump down into the dugout, shove open the door to the hallway that leads into the locker room. You can hear voices, hushed and desperately calm. You break into a full run, hardly aware that it’s happening until you’ve done it, and you shoulder the locker room door open. 

Jaylen’s sitting on the floor in a torn uniform, propped half-upright against a pile of her teammates’ duffel bags. She’s holding an electric blue Gatorade that she’s barely touched. The circles under her eyes are so dark it looks like she’s been punched, and her lips are cracked and bleeding, and her skin is ripped at the edges, and the smell of smoke is so strong it almost knocks you over, but she’s there. Here. 

You stumble to a stop, hand against the doorframe. “Jaylen,” you say numbly. Her teammates, huddled around her in a loose semicircle, look down and away like whatever expression is on your face is too personal, too much to be seen in public. You feel like you are bleeding out. 

Jaylen lifts her head. “Sutton.” Her eyes are wide and black. She glances down to her teammates and rasps, “Would you mind giving us the room?” 

Theodore gets to his feet, expression shadowed. “Will you be alright?” 

Her brow furrows, but she doesn’t move otherwise. “Of course I’ll be alright. You don’t have handle me with goddamn gloves.” 

“You’re literally still half dead, but okay,” Theodore tells her, then jerks his chin at the rest of the team. “Let’s go.” His gaze fixes on you. “Five minutes.” 

“What the hell do you think I’m gonna do, run off with her?” you snap, but you’re already crossing the room to her, footsteps too loud on the tiled floor. The team clears out fast, casting worried glances behind them, but you couldn’t care less. You drop to your knees at her side.

Seeing her up close again is—you don’t even know what to do with it. Hesitantly, you reach out your right hand to cup her cheek, and her eyes flutter shut. _It’s still her,_ you think. The thought startles you. Of course it's her: the freckles on her cheekbones, the tiny pale scar on her lower lip, the dark hair matted with dirt. The logic doesn’t follow there, her burning alive but crawling back out of the earth fully formed and zombielike, but here she is no less, mud under her fingernails and dust in her mouth. She tilts her face into your hand, unquestioning, and you can feel her breath on your wrist. 

“How are you feeling?” you whisper. 

“Like I need some fuckin’ chapstick,” she says hoarsely, eyes still shut, and you laugh, louder than the half-joke warrants, the noise clamoring off the walls. She smiles, too, but it fades. “Everybody keeps asking me that, you know.” 

“Yeah?” You wait for her to say more, but she doesn’t, just keeps her eyes closed. So you talk instead. “I, um, I took your aloe plant, after. It took some time to figure out how to keep it alive, but it’s growing pretty well now. You know how massive those things get? I keep having to buy bigger and bigger pots, and.” You keep expecting her to jump in. “I didn't know if you named it or not. I don’t have your talent for naming things, so I didn’t bother trying. I talk to it sometimes anyway, though. Ended up just calling it Plant because I don’t have anything better for it. Does it have a name?” 

“I don’t remember.” Her voice is lower than you remember. Gravelly, like she’s been smoking for years. 

“That’s alright,” you say, eyes burning. “That’s alright, Jay.” 

She curls her fingers around your wrist, not moving your hand away, just holding on, and you gather her closer to you, here on the floor of this dirty locker room, your burnt hand on her cheek and your arm wrapped around her back, and for the first time in five years she tucks her face into your neck, and for the first time in five years, you let yourself cry. 

* * *

The hiatus is quiet that year. You try not to think _calm before the storm,_ but the phrase appears in your head over and over, never when you expect it. 

Calm before the storm, and Jaylen is smiling at you wearily over her full mug of coffee. Calm before the storm, and she’s uncurling your fingers away from your palm to touch her fingertips to the burn, so intense and focused you can’t look directly at her. Calm before the storm, and you’re grocery shopping together, her in absurdly large celebrity sunglasses that hide half her face, and she laughs under her breath as they slip down her nose for the fifth time in the last minute and a half. Calm before the storm, and she’s sleeping in late the way she’d never had a chance to for as long as you’d known her, limbs sprawled out wildly across your bed. Calm before the storm, and you’re watching Jaylen joke around with the rest of the Garages, Theodore’s arm slung around her shoulder. They’re so happy to see her again. Calm before the storm, and you’re hanging out with the Crabs for the first time since the end of the season, reintroducing Nagomi back to the rest of the team, everybody tipsy and laughing. In the loud moments, in the quiet moments, in the moments so tender it feels like sacrilege to think this way. 

Calm before the storm, and Jaylen is tossing a blaseball from hand to hand, a white blur too fast to focus on, walking in circles around your kitchen. She’s muttering under her breath, and you can’t quite make out the words. Calm before the storm, and you keep catching her with two fingers to her throat, staring at nothing. _Checking,_ she says when you ask, but she won’t say what for. Calm before the storm. Her breath is a stuttering thing that happens only when she remembers she needs it to keep going. So many things that used to be so natural she could do it without thinking have become conscious by necessity. You watch her drift around the house, aimless and blank-eyed unless you interact with her directly, and you don’t want to liken her to a ghost, so you don’t. The thought turns in your stomach anyway, a knife in your pocket whose hilt you can’t stop running your fingers over. 

Calm before the storm, and you are so tired of spending every day waiting for your world to end. Because it always does. The world is always ending. 

* * *

Fifth game of the season, Jaylen’s pitching again. It feels surreal to think that. You’re playing the Jazz Hands in Colorado, and you’re distracted the whole game. Tot casts you glances every time you trudge back into the dugout after hitting yet another mindless flyout, ears flicking back in clear irritation, but since he’s a fox in most ways that matter, he doesn’t have much to say about it. Nagomi, stone-faced though she is, is more sympathetic. She doesn’t try to talk to you, thankfully, but she sits down pointedly at your side, blocking you from the view of your teammates, and stares straight ahead at the game. 

Gratefully, you fumble below the bench for your gym bag and your phone, and you pull up your _Splorts Live_ app. 

The Garages are wiping the floor with Breath Mints. 20-1. Seems a bit excessive, but that’s Jaylen, returning with brutal, triumphant style. Nothing of note in the footage they’re showing, just her in the process of striking out some pitiful Breath Mints dude. Foul ball. The game’s about done, and the reception on the bench here leaves much to be desired anyway, so you’re reaching your thumb up to click the phone off, but— 

Jaylen twists, rears back on her heel, and shoots forward again with a focus that you haven’t seen from her before. You can’t see the pitch itself, the feed is too grainy and the ball is moving too fast, but the camera does pick up a sickening _thunk_ and the agonized yelp of the batter, who hops back a few paces, dropping the bat to the sandy earth where it bounces once, twice, before lying still. 

_“Ouch! God!”_ he shouts in the video, cradling his left arm to his chest. _“What the hell, man?”_

The livestream doesn’t zoom in on Jaylen to catch her expression, but even at a distance you can see the pixelated shoulder lift in a grim shrug. _“Sorry, Clark. Pitch went a little wild.”_ Her posture is solid, her feet planted shoulder-width apart. Her pitching arm hangs loose at her side, free arm propped on her waist. She turns her head, gaze sweeping over the stadium. For a second, she stares straight into the camera, and you don’t recognize the look on her face. 

You fumble to turn your phone off and shove it back into your bag, sweating and not quite sure why. Kennedy lifts his head across the dugout, eyes narrowed, and you look back at him. Something in your expression makes him look away, line forming between his brow. 

The Crabs win the game, naturally. Without you getting on base even once. Doesn’t make much difference to you. The second you’re back in regular clothes and out on the street, you’re dialing Jaylen’s number. 

It goes to voicemail. Her phone’s probably dead. Fucking typical. 

“Call me back,” you say as soon as the automated voice prompts you to leave a message, and you hang up. 

* * *

She’s ignoring you. 

You’d be ignoring you too, all things considered. You checked the news afterward, and it wasn’t just Marquez Clark who got hit. Stew Briggs and Dickerson Morse too. But it’s been twenty-four hours at this point, and what are you going to do, fly across the country to kick her ass over it? In a moment of desperation, you’ve got your phone open to Mike Townsend’s contact page, and then you remember he’s gone. He’s gone so she can be here. 

You try calling her again, just for the hell of it. Jaylen’s phone tells you to leave a message after the tone, and you don’t hang up, but you don’t say anything either, just hold your breath and listen to the softly buzzing silence. 

Finally, she picks up. 

“Hey.” You were expecting fire and stubbornness and righteous pride. You were not expecting exhaustion. “What’s up.” 

“Hi. What does unstable mean?” you say curtly. “And why is everybody saying that Marquez, Stew, and Dickerson are?” 

“Wish I knew.” 

You scoff. “Yeah, okay. Sure.”

“I _don’t,”_ she says. “So I missed a few pitches. I don’t see why—” 

“Like hell you missed. You let players have a ball or two when you’re having an off day. Sometimes you even walk them by mistake. _That’s_ missing. What you _don’t_ do is bean them with one hundred mile per hour pitches—” 

“Holy shit, give me a _break,_ Sutton!” she laughs, bitter and incredulous. “I _died._ I’m so sorry if I’m not as _good_ as I was five fucking years ago, I’m kind of out of practice with the whole ‘being alive’ thing—” 

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.” 

“Do I?” 

“Don’t—” You pinch the bridge of your nose and breathe out sharply, then demand, “Don’t do that, alright? Look, are you okay?”

“I’m _fine._ Thanks so much for asking.” You don’t say anything for a minute, and she sighs, crackling over the phone. “I’m sorry. I’m trying, okay? I really am. I just want things to be normal.” 

“I hear not beaning random opponents is a pretty good step in that direction,” you say, and when she doesn’t respond, you grimace. “Sorry. Poor taste.” 

“Don’t worry about it,” she says, chuckling roughly. “I should’ve picked up sooner.” 

“Yeah, don’t do this again next time,” you tell her, and you hope the smile in your voice comes through. You don’t want to be mad at her, you don’t want blood on her hands or yours. 

“I won’t. Don’t come out of the gate swinging next time,” she says. 

“No promises. Get some real sleep tonight.” 

“No promises.” 

“I should’ve seen that one coming,” you say, pushing back against the inevitable tired smile. “But sure.” 

She snorts. “Sure.” You can imagine her swinging her feet as she perches on the edge of a hotel bed in Seattle, looking out at the city that she used to call hers. 

“You think you’re gonna move back there?” you ask after a few seconds. You only just got back to Baltimore earlier that night. It’s weird being home without her. The apartment is too empty. You went five years with just you filling this space, and after just a few months, the notion of an empty home has become foreign again. 

“Already that desperate to get rid of me?” You can hear her grinning. 

“Never,” you say, always just a little too sincere. You bite down on your lower lip and stare out your own window. Imagine eyes in the darkness.

She’s silent on the other end for a few seconds. Then: “Good.” 

* * *

It’s stupid to care about anyone when you play blaseball. Those who were capable of stopping did so a long time ago. 

Distantly, you can remember the time where teams would try to get to know each other, hang out if they passing through the same area. There would be get-togethers and parties and the jock equivalent of office mixers. Because you were opponents, sure, but you were all in this together. All that any of you wanted to do was play ball, and for that you need people on the other side of the field. Might as well make friends with them. 

Then the Book. Then Jaylen. Then the years of ash and the scream of feedback and the awful crack of a peanut shell closing up tight. 

It’s easier to shut it all out and focus on the people you can save. Or bear witness to. At least then if they die it’s in front of you, tangible, known. At least then it’s not picking up your phone, sweating and elated after a win, to find footage of your best friend burning to death on someone’s highlight reel. 

* * *

After getting home on Ruby Tuesday, you stand in the kitchen for a while. You don’t cry. You don’t scream. You don’t move or allow any noise out of you at all. Your fridge is making a funny sound, but not like the usual mechanical funny sound, more like a snarl. You should probably call someone about that. 

“Sutton!” she calls from the hallway, voice thin and reedy like she’s out of breath. “Hey, let me in! I forgot the spare key at the hotel room in Philly, I gotta call them to mail it back to me. Sutton? Are you there?” 

It takes you a moment to remobilize. When you do, you move as if through water, dreamlike and labored. 

You reach for the doorknob and pull it open. She doesn’t wait for you to step aside to let her in, just strides forward until you shuffle back, and you can see a wild spark in her eyes, her mouth in an open-mouthed, panting grin. 

“Jaylen—” you start as she closes the door behind her, an afterthought, but she’s turning again, and you can’t decide if her expression is crazed or focused. You don’t know which one scares you more.

“Wait,” she interrupts, and her right hand darts out to grab your wrist. You pull away on instinct, and she releases you immediately, stumbling back, eyes wide. “Wait,” she tries again. “Please,” and there’s that gleam again, desperate and wanting _something,_ but you don’t know what, you can’t even imagine. 

_“What,”_ you grit out, breathing hard. “Three of the people you marked _burned_ today, aren’t you going to even try to explain—?” 

“I _am_ trying to,” she says, eyes now hard as flint. “Look, just trust me, okay?” She waits a long moment. Doesn’t take her gaze off you until, slowly, you nod. You do trust her. 

Jaylen reaches out again, wraps her fingers around your left hand with deliberate slowness, tilts her head back, and guides your fingers to rest against the side of her throat. 

Her eyes are closed, and her grip is loose and heavy, and she’s still breathless, lips parted. For a second you just stand there looking up at her, feeling the muscles in her neck shift as she swallows, and. And. 

“Do you feel it?” she whispers, that delirious grin curling her mouth up at the corners. “My pulse?” 

You do. Faint, but pressing down with your index and middle finger, it’s unmistakable. 

“What?” is all you can think to say. 

“It’s there. It’s—I can feel my heartbeat again, Sutton, I’m _alive.”_

“You’ve been alive,” you say blankly. “For months.” 

Jaylen shakes her head firmly. “Not like this.” 

“I-I don’t understand.” 

“It’s like—like logic in a dream, you know?” she says, bringing her head back upright but leaving your hand there on her neck, her fingers resting over yours. “It doesn’t make sense when you try to explain it to someone, but it has its rules. It was…” She shakes her head again. “It’s like, I’m here, right? You know I’m here, you can touch me, you can see me. My limbs move. I speak. But I wasn’t really alive yet. Now, though, it’s like—I’m breathing again for real.” She levels a piercing look at you. “Did you notice? That before, I only breathed when I was thinking about it?” 

You had. You just hadn’t thought— 

You don’t know what you thought. Not this, though. 

“So you’re in control of it?” you ask, taking your fingers off her pulse. Her skin was hot, too hot, feverish. “You _want_ this to happen?”

 _“No,”_ she says vehemently. 

“I don’t believe you.” You don’t even know if you’re lying, but her face doesn’t change at all either way. 

“Then don’t,” Jaylen says. “It doesn’t make a difference.” 

That gives you pause more than almost more than anything else has in the last couple of minutes. “What do you mean it—” Your breath rushes out of you as if punched. “This is going to keep happening.” 

She won’t meet your eyes anymore. “Yes.” 

“Jaylen, you can’t keep—” 

“I don’t have another _option,_ alright? I’m all out! This is it!” She spreads her arms, chuckles like a knife sawing into bone. “This is all you get!” Her arms drop back to her sides, and she sways a little on her feet but her lip still curls in a sneer. “You wanted me back and I’m back. So now you all have to deal with what that actually means.” 

“Nobody could have known.” 

A strangled laugh rips its way out of her. “And if you had, what would you have done? Left me there? Would you have decided I wasn’t worth it? Would you lay down that judgment?” 

You know what the right answer is here. From a moral standpoint anyway. You aren’t an idiot. You know the right answer is that Jaylen’s life has no more worth than Moody’s or Elijah’s or McLaughlin’s. You know the right answer is that you would have left her to her rest, or to whatever new nightmares come after death in this world. You know the right answer. 

It’s just that the right answer would be a lie. 

So. “No. I wouldn’t,” you tell her, and you don’t look at her. However she feels about this, you don’t want to see it, so you keep your gaze downcast and you turn on your heel and you walk back to the kitchen. 

She trails after you, lost, some stray animal of a woman. “You wouldn’t?” And the teeth to match. Even if she’s not showing them now. 

“No. I would have brought you back anyway.” You take a deep, steadying breath and pull two mugs down from the cupboard. “You said this isn’t your fault, so. What happens happens. It’ll pass. We’ll figure it out. Dinner?” 

“Sure,” she says, voice wavering. “Dinner sounds good.” 

* * *

You’re lying in bed on one of the many nights that she’s away. You’re remembering, because with Jaylen, you’re always remembering. She exists more in your mind than she does in your home, in your life. You’re remembering golden days and muggy nights and showering together, soap and the day’s dirt running off both of you in rivulets. It’s another hot, unbearable night in Baltimore, and the breeze coming from your window isn’t nearly enough. You feel immaterial. You think if somebody tried to lay hands on you now they would probably pass right through. _Am I real?_ you think over and over and over again. _Does it make any difference?_ If you tried to lay hands on somebody else now they would probably pass right through. Jaylen isn’t here for you to test that theory. She’s out somewhere maybe throwing a pitch that will one day end somebody’s life, maybe trying to remember how to play her bass guitar. You’re remembering the pulse in her throat, her head tilted back. You’re remembering the way the breath dragged out of her. You think, _I could have killed her again right then._ The knife always in your pocket. You don’t know much about anatomy, but you do know about jugular, about carotid. If you tried to lay hands on somebody else now they would probably pass right through, but a blade might just do the trick. You don’t want to kill Jaylen. You don’t want to kill anybody. It’s just a thought you’re having. You’re remembering years of dreams, but of course you know the human mind dreams more each night than the skull was ever meant to fit and so they come leaking out, rot the foundation. But you’re still living here. It’s home. You’re remembering her breath on your lips, her fingers grazing over the mesh shirt you’ve always worn under your jersey. You’re remembering the vicious way she smiles. You’re remembering the smell of smoke. You’re remembering the smell of smoke. Stop remembering the smell of smoke. Charred flesh, ash settling on bone. You’re remembering her like she’s still dead. You're remembering her like she’s something you still have to mourn. 

* * *

Somebody burns and that night she tells you she loves you for the very first time. You don’t hesitate before saying it back. You wonder if that makes you complicit. 

* * *

“I can see it, you know,” Jaylen sneers. “I’m not stupid. I know that whenever I walk out on the field, people are just thinking _was it worth it? Should we have just left her dead?”_ She laughs, and it’s an ugly, brutal sound. “I don’t care anymore. I don’t care. If people gave all that up for nothing, that’s fine. I don’t have to _prove_ myself to them, I don’t have to justify my goddamn existence. They think I’m a bad deal? They think I came back wrong? Fine. Maybe I did. What the fuck are they gonna do about it?”

* * *

“Come back to bed, Jay,” you whisper until the words have no meaning. “Come back.” 

* * *

“So what happens if you play us?” you ask, as casually as you can manage. You don’t want to bring it up, but. Halfway to the end of the regular season. Hard to know for sure, but Crabs and Garages are both championship material. 

“What do you mean ‘what happens’?” Jaylen replies, turning away for a moment from the garlic she’s chopping. 

“I mean with your whole—” You gesture at her up and down. “Pitching thing.”

“Oh,” she says, and the knife goes still. She lays it down gently on the cutting board. 

“What if you make it to the championship again and we play each other?”

“Are you really asking me if I’m gonna mark you for death?” she asks, aiming for a joke but not quite getting there. 

“Yeah, I guess I am,” you say, annoyed and not quite sure why. “Maybe I get worried about the possibility of getting incinerated, Jay. It didn’t look like a whole lot of fun.”

“It wasn’t,” she says coolly. “Thanks. Do you really think I’d—” 

“You’re not in control of it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to—” You look at her, and she looks back, unreadable. “You said you weren’t in control of it.”

“I’m _not,”_ she insists, and she turns back to the garlic. Starts cutting it up with more vigor than is strictly necessary. You open your mouth to say something else, but the water’s boiling in the pot on the stove so you drop the pasta in and dial down the heat a bit before leaning back against the counter and folding your arms, watching her. She’s moved on to a tomato now, fingers digging too hard into the red flesh of it. The skin will bruise. 

“You know,” you say flatly. “You’ve never hit anybody before that you were actually friends with.” 

“Seriously, Dreams—” 

“Why did you lie and tell me you weren’t in control? I would’ve—” 

“You would’ve _what?_ What could you have _possibly_ done?” She smacks the knife back down onto the cutting board and rounds on you. “And I never lied to you. For the record. I wouldn’t. I didn’t choose this, alright, I’m not a murderer for _fun._ I don’t like this any more than you do. Yes, I’m the one throwing the ball, and yes, I’m fully in my right mind when I do it, and yes, I’m the one who has to make the conscious fucking decision that this person probably won’t get to live through the month now, and they’re going to die just like I did, but it’s not because I _want_ it. I’m not in control here. I’m—” She lurches backward, breathing hard, and digs the heels of her hands into her eyesockets. “I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t. I just want to live.” 

Hesitantly, you approach her and reach out a hand. “Is it alright if I—” 

She nods jerkily, and you place your hand on her forearm, thumb over her pulse. Still there. 

“Do you know what happens if you stop?” you ask softly. 

Jaylen shakes her head. “No,” she whispers. “But I can feel it. When I’ve gone too long without another hit.” You had thought as much. But you’d hoped—

It doesn’t matter what you’d hoped. You should have known better by now.  
  
“How does it feel? When one of them burns?”

“Good, Sutton. It feels so _good.”_ Her voice is little more than a rasp. “It feels like I’m so alive I’m bursting out of my skin.” Eyes slide closed. “Is that how it used to be all the time? Do you feel so bright?” 

You laugh, a shuddering thing. “No. I don’t.” 

Silence, then: “I’m sorry,” she says. 

“It’s okay.” 

“Not really.” 

“No,” you say. “Not really. But still.” 

* * *

Games go by where she doesn’t hit anybody with a pitch. People avoid her anyway. You don’t really blame them. Ever the performer, she tosses her hair back and grins fiercely out at the crowd, eyes flashing. She understands the role she has been slated to play. The villain, the horror, the returned. She plays it well. You’re almost proud of her. 

Jaylen’s always been sharp. It would come out sometimes before, even when she wasn’t trying. Like how a cat’s claws unsheathe when it stretches. Like how a wolf always has its teeth. A sense of humor a bit too harsh for polite company, pride that pushes just over the line of what the press is willing to accept. That unflinching honesty. You’d liked the sharpness, didn’t mind that if you pressed your thumb too hard against the edge of her you might start bleeding. 

It’s just that now, you think, if you took that knife out of your pocket and vivisected her, if you cut a line from breastbone to pelvis and peeled back the skin, all you’d find is teeth. 

* * *

Sometime near the end of the season, a few days after Yazmin Mason is incinerated, the photos come out. 

They aren’t too unsavory. The photographer, whoever they were, caught you in a moment of tenderness—one hand cupping the side of her face, the other nestled at the small of her back. There’s a slight smile curling at the edges of her lips, and she’s a breath away from kissing you again in the image, grainy and barely lit well enough to make out either of your features. You sort of wish it had been some moment of grotesque passion plastered across the front page of the tabloids instead. You with your tongue down her throat or a blurred snapshot of some semi-public tryst. This quiet intimacy feels like more of a violation, a rare stolen moment of tenderness blown up too large and thrown out for the whole world to see. No plausible deniability there either. No argument that it was a one-time thing. You look like lovers because you were, because you are. 

Anyway, Kennedy sends you a picture of the cover of _Splorts Today!_ for sale in the 7-Eleven checkout line. No caption, no followup message. You stare at your phone for five minutes, uncomprehending. Then you put the phone facedown on the table and go to make dinner. You have no business being on the cover of a tabloid. You play mediocre blaseball and you're trying to take up drawing but you aren't very good at it yet. You talk to the aloe plant in your windowsill. You aren’t a scandal. You’re just a person. 

Still. The whole league knows now. Kennedy and Theodore and Mike had stayed quiet about it since season one, which likely counts as a minor miracle, but you can't help but feel like their years of silence were useless now, after everything.

People start avoiding you too, some of the Crabs included. Mostly the new kids, sure, the ones who didn’t know you and Jaylen back in season one. It still stings. _I’m not dangerous,_ you want to say, but the words die in your throat. 

* * *

You fly out to Charleston to pick Jaylen up after a game so she doesn’t have to endure the bus ride to Baltimore. Her teammates don’t like sharing hotel rooms with her much anymore, so she sleeps at your place when she can.

Walking together through the stadium, the crowd parts around you. Glances exchanged unsubtly, tense murmurs. Cameras flash in the dusk, and you take her hand and stare straight ahead. The murmurs collapse into a silence that spreads out through the stands, the two of you at the epicenter. All eyes are turned to you. They are afraid of you and they condemn you and there are no words for that, so instead they watch. Horribly, you want to laugh. 

You don’t laugh, though, and Jaylen doesn’t either. You hold hands and, without a sound, leave the stadium. The surrounding gauntlet is silent as the grave. 

* * *

“Why are you still with her?” Nagomi asks one day, halfway through practice. You blink up at her, wait for more of the question, but she just holds your gaze. She doesn’t repeat herself because she knows you heard. She doesn’t clarify because she knows you understand. Not much for words, Nagomi. You were surprised to hear her voice at all. 

“Because I love her.” You kick the toe of your cleat against first base and watch the dust scatter away. Avoid Nagomi’s eyes. “I mean, why else?” 

She knocks her carcinized arm against yours and nods, face unreadable as ever. “That’s a good reason,” she says. “Just don’t think you can save her.” 

You chuckle, a strangled halfway thing. “Don’t worry. I don’t.” 

* * *

You don’t, no. But you think— 

You refuse to give it up anyway. Hope in the hopeless. Isn’t that what life was supposed to be about? 

Jaylen disappears after the championships. Doesn’t answer her phone, though that isn’t exactly a new development. So Nagomi takes you and Kennedy out drinking that night, and it’s… nice. You and he end up doing most of the talking, but that doesn’t bother you so much as it used to anymore. You’ve gotten good at carrying the conversation. And Nagomi’s a good listener, nods in all the right places, focuses in on what you two are saying. You talk about how good the Wild Wings got out of nowhere and wonder if it’ll last, and you talk about next season’s workout regimen (less lifting, more running, which Nagomi is put out by), and you talk about what blessings you think you’ll get. You talk about online recipes and public transportation in Baltimore and the now-defunct arcade a block away from your apartment that you hadn’t thought about since it closed two years ago and the new music and movies and tv shows you all must have missed during the season. 

Nagomi swirls her whiskey around in her highball glass and watches the whirlpool it creates. “I think that may be the strangest part,” she says contemplatively. “The atemporality.” 

“What?” you say. 

Nagomi doesn’t say anything else, so Kennedy jumps in. “The disconnect between the way we experience the world and the way everybody else must. We just… aren’t part of it.” He shrugs. “Think about our schedules, right? We wake up every morning, we eat breakfast, we play ball. Sometimes we stay in the same city when we’re done, sometimes we move on. At night, we sleep. There isn’t really any in between. This goes on for… what, a third of the year? For a third of the year, we don’t interact with the world the way we would if we were a part of it. I think I go grocery shopping. I must go grocery shopping because there is food in my fridge. I still have an apartment and the utilities still work, so I must be paying bills. Sometimes I think I might be dreaming what scraps of normal life I have.” 

“Oh,” you say. 

“The siestas,” Nagomi says, eyes on her whiskey. The surface is still swirling.

“The siestas,” Kennedy agrees, brow furrowed. “Those take up the remaining two thirds of the year. Except for the long break from a few years ago. Do you even remember that? I don’t. The siestas feel compressed. Too short but too long at the same time, like drifting off to sleep and only seconds passing before you’re awake again, except, of course, it’s been eight hours, not seconds at all.”

“You’re getting eight hours of sleep?” you joke, but it tastes like ash on your tongue. 

“Rarely,” he smiles wearily. “But I can dream, right?” 

You push your cocktail glass away from you, laughing nervously. “I don’t know if I can handle talking about the nature of reality and time right now.” 

“Sorry,” Kennedy says. “I just try not to sleep too late on siestas. I try to experience as much of the world as I can. Even the mundane.” He sighs and looks down at where his fingers are woven up together on the table. “Especially the mundane. Going on walks and looking at how Baltimore has changed. Watching the sun rise over the bay. Grocery shopping. Taxes. Catching up on podcasts. You know. Being alive.” 

Nagomi swirls the glass around again and nods. Kennedy sighs again.

“Thank you, Kennedy,” you say. “Seriously.” You don’t know what you’re thanking him for—everything, probably—but you lean against him just for a second, and he leans back. 

* * *

Jaylen renegotiates her debt. She won’t tell you how or why or when or where or with who or what any of it means, but she renegotiates, and she stops marking people for death, and she’s still here.

* * *

The eighth season drags on. She visits you in Baltimore when she can. She still hasn’t bothered to buy a place in Seattle, even for during the season or spring training. You ask her about missing band practice, if nothing else and she laughs. She’s barely picked up her bass in months, and anyways the team has spent more time without her than with her by now. They’ll be fine. 

She hits people with her pitches and they start to flicker.

Jaylen starts to flicker too. You try not to worry about it. 

Crabs win the championship again. _Just one more,_ you think. You don’t feel anything about it at all or you aren't allowing yourself to feel anything about it at all. Either way the result is the same. You won. You go home. 

* * *

In late October you find her hunched over the bathroom sink, knuckles turning white from how hard she’s gripping the porcelain rim, and the floor is covered with her curls. There are safety scissors clenched in her right fist, and she’s hacking away at her hair furiously. Doesn’t even pause when you come in.

“Jesus, Jay,” you tell her. “You know I have an actual electric clipper, right?” There’s no heat behind your words, but you play at harshness here anyway because you have to. Jaylen doesn’t take kindness well, not when she’s like this. 

“Fuck off,” she grits out. That, too, is performative. 

“Let me help,” you say, more a command than an offer, and all the fight rushes out of her. She nods and lets the scissors drop to the tiles. Nods again, curling and uncurling her fingers. You step carefully around the scissors and pull the electric clipper from the middle drawer. “Sit down,” you tell her, keeping your voice level, calming. “It’ll be easier.” She does so without arguing, head dropping forward. 

You kneel behind her, put a quarter inch guard on the clipper, plug it in. It vibrates to life in your hand, the buzz of it deafening in the quiet, but Jaylen doesn’t react even as you wince at the noise. You run your hands through her hair before you start to cut. Just because you can. It’s a messy job, you think, which makes sense considering how hard she’s still shaking. So, carefully, you touch the clipper to her scalp. 

It’s numbing, thoughtless work. All you’re concentrating on is trying to get it even. Run the clipper over her skull again and again until you manage to get everything. The cut hair sticks to the back of her neck, her face, your fingers. She doesn’t say anything the whole time, all out of snark. Keeps swaying back to lean against your chest, her hips tucked between your knees, and you have to keep pushing her forward gently so that you can still reach the base of her skull. It doesn’t take nearly as long to cut her hair as you make it seem—you’re done in under five minutes—but her eyes are lightly closed, and she’s swaying a little bit when you aren’t holding her steady, so you let the moment stretch itself out, thin enough to see through.

More innumerable minutes pass, and finally you brush ineffectually at the back of her neck. “We should have gotten a towel to wrap around your shoulders.” 

She breathes out something that is nearly a chuckle. “And whose fault is that?” 

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” 

She’s silent for a long moment, and you flick the clipper off, set it aside. “How do I look?” she asks. You know she doesn’t mean to sound as vulnerable as she does, and you know she would hate that you’re hurting for her. But. 

“Let me see,” you say after a just-too-long pause, shuffling backward so she has room to turn herself around. You look. Her features are all the more striking with short hair, strong brow and long nose and those big, dark eyes. You put a hand up to her face, hesitance somewhere on the border of reverent, and lightly trace the hollow of her left eye, feel the hard bone beneath your thumb. Your words are stuck somewhere in your throat, and she’s still watching you like you hold all the keys. 

“Sutton?” she says, halfway between breath and self-conscious laughter. 

“Beautiful,” you whisper. “You look beautiful, Jay.” 

* * *

Feedback, you’ve decided, is the worst weather. 

Jaylen spends more nights away than ever as her hometown skips around the nation. It’s probably for the best that she never bought a place back in Seattle after all. At least she can always come home to you. Nothing changes. You miss her more than you'd expected to anyway. 

She feedbacks to the Shoe Thieves. Esme Ramsey punches her square in the face. There’s a video of it that goes semi-viral on Twitter, taken from the stands: Jaylen stumbling into the dugout, still unsteady from the feedback, hands running unconsciously over her new uniform. Esme standing bolt upright, launching herself across the room, and slamming her fist square into Jaylen’s nose. Jaylen staggering backward, hands over her face, head tilted backwards, and Esme yelling something at her that the video can’t quite pick up over the dull wail of feedback. Esme’s teammates dragging her back and Jaylen crumpling against the wall of the dugout. Nobody goes to help her. 

You don’t get a chance to ask her about it for another month. She’s just not in the area.

When you do ask, she shrugs, hands shoved deep into her pockets. “What could I have done?” 

“Anything!” you half-yell. “Literally anything! Why the hell did you just let her—” 

She laughs bitterly. “Yeah, because it would’ve looked just _great_ if I hit her back. There goes Jaylen again, you all know how _she_ is, she might not set people on fire anymore but don’t worry, she’ll still attack anyone who looks at her funny—” 

“You don’t have to just stand there and _take_ it!” You’re fully shouting now, and you’re just praying your upstairs neighbors don’t file a complaint. 

“We’re even now,” Jaylen says flatly. “We’re square. We aren’t gonna be friends, that's for sure, but she’s probably not gonna daydream about scooping my eyes out with a melon baller anymore either, which is an upgrade. It’s better than what most of the league thinks of me. I don’t give a shit. More people could do it. I’d survive.” She scoffs. “What are they gonna do, kill me twice? Then the debt I paid off with their friends’ fuckin' _lives_ wouldn’t mean anything. They’re all stuck with me now.” 

You wish she would get angry. You miss the anger. You miss when she felt things so sharply she was liable to cut the people around her. You didn’t mind the blood. But she stands now in your living room, slumped and made small, hands still shoved into the pockets of her denim jacket. 

“Don’t let any more people hurt you,” you say wretchedly. “Please.” 

“Yeah,” she says. “Sure.” 

* * *

The Thieves make it to the championship and, for the first time in longer than you can remember, you’re playing Jaylen. 

It’s surreal to see her standing there on the pitcher’s mound when just this morning she was standing in your kitchen, humming “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” as the coffee steeped. You don’t even know if she noticed she was doing it, but it was— 

You hit a few ground outs. In the bottom of seventh inning, you manage to get a triple off one of her pitches, and as you round the bases, you watch her grin at you just like she did over a decade ago, and something about it— 

The Shoe Thieves somehow manage to reverse sweep you the next day, Stu hitting a triple home run in the bottom of the ninth, and it stings to have your third championship ripped out from under you like that, but some part of you is almost relieved— 

The skies go dark. The rush of deja vu suffocates. Jaylen is pitching again, why is Jaylen pitching again— 

You can make out screaming from the stands, but they aren’t screams of terror, they’re screams of elation. _Fight gods, fight gods, and we’re gonna win—_

You don’t win. 

* * *

The locker rooms and the stadium take a while to clear out, but you wait in the dugout til they do. You know Jaylen will do the same. 

Like you expected, you find her on the field when everyone’s gone. She’s standing, lost, on the pitcher’s mound. Hasn’t washed the dirt off her face. Looks exhausted. The buzzcut’s grown out a bit, and sweat sticks the beginnings of the returning curls flat against her temples.

“You pitched a good game,” you tell her. 

“Not good enough.” 

“Six innings against a god? I’d take it if I were you.” 

“Yeah,” she says. “Sure.” 

You stand next to her for a while, and she sways against your side. 

“How do I keep doing this?” Jaylen whispers, eyes unfocused. “How am I supposed to keep going?” 

“You just do,” you say. “What’s the alternative?” 

She nods. Stares at the ground. 

You’re thinking about Ascension but you’re remembering her arms around you that first night, remembering the way her voice sounded when she said she loved you. You’re remembering the burn on your palm and how her fingers still fit the scars perfectly because hers are the fingers that made them. Something in this world that will not change even if it cracks apart under your feet.

You grab her hand and you hold on. The empty stadium watches. If both of you are to rot, you will rot in the same grave. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> thank you all for taking the time to read this. seriously, this is probably the most self-indulgent fic i've ever written. you can find me on tumblr @fourteenthidol, and if you choose to comment, it really makes my day! thank you again!
> 
>  **update as of 1/7/21:** i'm now writing a sequel, so look forward to that! jaylen pov, picking up where this left off and leading up to present day.


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